Statement by Magdy Martínez-Solimán to the Executive Board on the Independent Evaluation Office Work Plan 2018-2021

Magdy Martínez-Solimán is UNDP’s Assistant Administrator and Director of the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support.

Excellency Ambassador Jagdish D. Koonjul, President of the Executive Board,

Director Indran Naidoo,

Distinguished Members of the Executive Board,

UNDP is committed to transparency and accountability and places great value in the independence and impartiality of the Independent Evaluation Office, whose work is vital to help UNDP learn and continue to improve its performance.

In consultation with UNDP management, the IEO has developed a new Work Plan for 2018-2021. It is the first medium-term plan proposed by the Office following the adoption of the new UNDP Evaluation Policy and UNDP’s new Strategic Plan with which its time horizon is aligned.

The four-year Work Plan includes thematic and programme evaluations that are expected to generate valuable evidence for UNDP offices to draw on in the implementation of the Strategic Plan and the Regional and Country Programmes and related projects.

The Work Plan also includes the full evaluation of the Strategic Plan and Regional and Country Programmes as well as the review of the Evaluation Policy adopted by the Executive Board in September 2016. UNDP will diligently support those evaluations, protecting their independence and impartiality and continuing to learn from their findings and conclusions as part of our commitment to accountability, transparency and evidence-based programming.

Allow me to share some key messages related to the IEO workplan:

· First, UNDP aims to allocate the required resources to ensure that the IEO can carry out its work, as described in its Work Plan and in accordance with Article 26 of the Evaluation Policy which calls for a minimum of 1% core and non-core resources to be earmarked to the evaluation function.

· Second, IEO Programme Evaluations will replace the Assessment of Development Results, or ADRs. Independent Country Programme Evaluations will be carried out for all UNDP country programmes prior to new Country Programme Documents being submitted to the Executive Board, as requested by the Board in its Decision 2015/8.

· Third, we look forward to the systematic quality assessment of decentralized evaluations, which the IEO resumed in 2017 and which will help UNDP to identify recurrent issues with the evaluability of our projects and the still present capacity gaps in managing evaluations.

I thank Director Indran Naidoo and his team in the Independent Evaluation Office for developing this comprehensive Work Plan and for the valuable support extended to my team in strengthening the decentralized evaluation function.